I searched for "dragons" at the Philadelphia Free Library. 5,802 results showed up. I doomscrolled through a few hundred and couldn't find Smaug, the most iconi

I searched for "dragons" at the Philadelphia Free Library. 5,802 results showed up. I doomscrolled through a few hundred and couldn't find Smaug, the most iconic and influential dragon of the twentieth century. https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Search/Results?lookfor=dragons&submit=&searchme=catalog&searchType=simple https://catalog.freelibrary.org/Search/Results?lookfor=drago... Then I searched Google for "book with dragon" and The Hobbit is the fourth result. Librarians are really intelligent people. All the recent engineering marvels that Google does under the hood to provide meaningful results, such as PageRank and machine learning, librarians have always been able to do in their heads. They are not unsophisticated users who click on the first picture they like. If your search algorithms are simpler than what Google does, then you can count on librarians to fill in the gaps for you. But in order to do that, they need control. Because when someone can't find something in the library, because full-text search isn't taking into consideration popularity, then what do kids do? They go to the librarian, who enters the complicated search for them, based on what they know, and they know a lot. So I think the librarian was being perfectly reasonable. You should have empowered her with the tools she needs to do her job. You could have just as easily put it behind a drop-down that's hidden by default, so both her and the kids are happy.